Favorite quote, by Maya Angelou*:
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
In 2021 at Sisense, I found a pile of NPS responses, buried user reviews, and support tickets that nobody had time to read. Not because they weren't important. Because there was no instrument to read them at scale. I built one.
A dashboard that pulled signal from noise, categorized, contextualized, and told a story that PMs could act on without spending weeks in the data. It cut time-to-insight by 75%. More importantly, it revealed things the structured research had missed entirely.​ That experience planted something.
​WHAT THE RESEARCH DOESN'T REACH
​Working through Toptal across multiple 0-to-1 AI product projects, I kept running the same analysis. And across every project, the same pattern appeared.
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​The problem space as described in the research was not the one lived by the people inside it.
Structured UX research is powerful. User interviews, carefully designed studies — when done well, they paint a precise picture. But they paint it inside a frame that someone has already defined. Wide-scale industry research maps the forest. It cannot tell you which tree is rotting in your specific clearing.
There is a third source that almost nobody uses systematically.
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​Unsolicited testimonials. People venting in forums. Practitioners complaining in subreddits. Users leave reviews nobody reads. Unguarded, unfiltered, unmonitored. Rant is gold. When you contextualize it, analyze it emotionally, and triangulate it, it becomes the most honest signal in your problem space.
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​While mapping 319 unsolicited testimonials at BlueHour, I found what I now call the persona gap. C-suite knowledge of AI failure: minimal, filtered, shaped by what people felt safe saying upward. Working-level knowledge: visceral, specific, and almost never reaching the decision-makers. That distance is structural. Invisible to surveys. Inaudible in interviews. It only appeared in the unofficial conversations.
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​That finding gave the product team transparency into their market that no commissioned research could have provided.
What I work on:
UX/AI research strategy, 0-to-1 product development, pain mapping, AI opportunity analysis, behavioral UX design, product-market fit diagnostics.
Who I work with:
Founders, product teams, and agencies — through Toptal and directly.
If you are deciding what to build or trying to understand why what you built isn't landing, this is exactly where that starts.
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